Partnership Agreement in combination with Enterprise Agreement

[Ryu]

Hello,

I have some quick and trivial questions/concerns, I was hoping to clarify in this forum.

Please excuse my ignorance on this topic 🙂

Our company (having a Microsoft Partnership Agreement) has been acquired by a large organization (using a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement), and the plan is to integrate our AD Domain and O365 tenant into theirs, to improve collaboration.

My main concern, is to achieve that, without losing our MPN benefits.

If I understand correctly, I should be able to redeem the various MPN cloud benefits' vouchers, in the HQ's tenant.

And to take advantage of our Visual Studio licenses, I will have to point our MPN to the HQ's Azure AD.

I wasn't able to find a definite best-practice around this subject so far. Your advice and recommendations are welcome.

Thank you

[JanoschUlmer]

@Ryu : Is the company that acquired you also a Microsoft Partner? Do you also manage CSP customers in your current Partner Center account? 

Would it be OK for you to keep the current tenant you have for managing your Partnership, or should the tenant be merged (removed) by all means?

[Ryu]

Hi Janosch,

No, they are not MS Partners

No CSP customers

I don't see any issue maintaining the current tenant for Partnership management purposes, as long as my users are on the HQ's tenant.

[JanoschUlmer · Accepted solution]

OK.

So you could use this feature to invite the new HQs tenant into your current Partner Center account: https://support.microsoft.com/en-ph/help/4495700/partner-center-multi-tenancy-feature-consolidating-tenants

This would enable you to access all your MPN benefits using user accounts in the HQ. However, global admin in the HQ would then also be able to gain control about your Partner Center.

The other option would be to invite some users from the HQ as guests to the MPN tenant, so you can assign Visual Studio licenses to them. Activation tokens for other licenses can be redeemed in the HQ tenant anyway, as you already mentioned.

I would also advise to check the MPN agreement (in Partner Profile section in your Partner Center) if there are any specific terms in using software license benefits from MPN with affiliates that are not Partners themselves. Afaik there should be no issues, but better double check.

[Ryu]

Thank you @JanoschUlmer,

Multi-tenancy solution seems to tick most of the boxes. Thanks!

I'm not concerned about HQ being able to use MPN licenses, that's not the purpose of this. The plan is to keep the MPN benefits for ourselves

I'm mostly concerned if it is technically possible for the users of each tenant, to collaborate (eg. Teams, Sharepoint, etc) directly with the other tenant's, without being invited as guests.

[JanoschUlmer]

You can not collaborate between different tenants if the users are not added as guests

[Ryu]

Thank you @JanoschUlmer ,

That's what I had in mind. I've been trying to avoid using guest accounts, as it gets messy when there are too many webapps and users involved.

So my only option is to migrate to HQ's tenant, and add their tenant to my Partner Center.

Since I am not worried about their Global Admins accessing our PC, and MPN licenses will still be used only by us.

Also my certified users will remain under the PC account, so we get to maintain the various competencies and benefits in the future.

Is that right?

[JanoschUlmer]

Well, if you migrate (move) the users from your current tenant to the HQ tenant, they will need to re-associate their MCP ID to their new user account in partner - or you simply keep the old user account in place to not impact the MCP association.

In either option you can maintain competencies and benefits without issues.

[Ryu]

Thank you very much @JanoschUlmer for your quick and great answers.

You covered me. Now I feel ready to break things myself now 🙂

Have a great rest of the day

[Andra]

Hi @Ryu ,

Thank you for raising this interesting scenario.

Advisable would be to have the merge company use the support agreement

(premier or perhaps an Advanced support for partners) or you can reach out to Frontline Support to submit a query here: https://partner.microsoft.com/support .

The support agents should have more visibility to look into the agreements (EA and MPN) and make recommendations accordingly.

Have a great day ahead,

Andra